Unquestionably there's a lot of crap out there on these topics. But what we can probably all agree would be nice is if there were some site which organized such things with the ability for user moderation to raise the better material above the crap.
(Unfortunately this does not seem to be what Yahoo has in mind...)
They are a company in business to make money, remember.
If they had wanted to establish a continuous influx of money by making reasonably secure voting machines, then they probably could have, as demonstrated by their previous product lines. But they apparently did not, and thus they did not.
It might be in their corporate charter to make money, but that does not mean the executives and employees of Diebold were necessarily acting with this as their primary goal.
The problem is simply that they got caught in the midst of their duplicity.
For example, I have osteogenesisimperfecto. Inherited from my mother and a 50% chance of passing to my children. It does not effect re productivity and has negligible mortality.
If it has negligible mortality, then it is not particularly harmful. If it is mostly neutral, then it only increases genetic diversity. Genetic diversity increases the ability of a species to survive changes to the environment, since it means a wide variety of mutations which are not harmful in the current environment have been selected. If some tiny fraction of them happen to become beneficial after a change in environment, then that fraction of neutral or minimally harmful mutations will become beneficial and will begin to dominate as in the above example where neutral mutations were excluded for simplicity. (Real life example: sickle-cell anemia.)
But before we do the math, don't we need to figure out how to determine what the words "harmful" and "beneficial" mean?
For a discussion of evolution these definitions are quite simple:
Harmful: Reduces the probability of producing viable offspring. Neutral: Does not change the probability of producing viable offspring. Beneficial: Increases the probability of producing viable offspring.
(Note that this can be changed through changes in reproductive efficiency, or through changes that affect the chance of a single species member or group of species members surviving in their current environment.)
By force of logic, every mutation will therefore either be harmful, neutral, or beneficial. As I said, feel free to choose your own numbers for the probabilities for these and redo the calculation.
You would be right, except that's precisely what selection takes care of. Yes, most mutations are NOT beneficial, but this does not matter because the non-beneficial mutations die off quickly, and the rare beneficial ones survive to spread expontentially.
Imagine a species has 100 million members, and lets say it is a large-sized species which experiences a generation turnover every 20 years or so. Lets say there is a low mutation rate of perhaps 1% of offspring having some mutation. Let us also say that 99% of mutations are harmful, or perhaps even fatal, and a mere 1% are beneficial. Now we do the math:
If 1% of the population experiences a mutation, that means 1 million will experience a mutation per generation. If 99% of these are harmful, that means 990,000 will die or fail to procreate, or 0.99% of the total population. If 1% of the mutations are beneficial, that means 10,000 will have some superior trait.
At the end of this cycle, there are still around 100 million members, but 10,000 of them, or 0.01%, have a beneficial mutation. Now by definition of a "beneficial" mutation, from an evolutionary perspective, this means that those 10,000 are more likely to survive and procreate than the other 100 million or so.
Lets say each beneficial mutation is only beneficial by a very tiny amount, such that a pair of members without the mutation can have an average of 1.95 children survive to reproduce, while pairs with the mutation can have an average of 2.05 children survive to reproduce. In this case, within 200 generations, or 4,000 years, the members of the species which have received at least one beneficial mutation from the first generation of mutations will outnumber the unmutated members of the species by 2:1.
Feel free to tweak the numbers however you see fit, and you will see that it will still work out, and the only thing you will change by tweaking numbers is how long it takes. Evolution does not require the balance of the numbers to be in its favor, because the process of mutation and selection is intrinsically in favor of improvement, even when the beneficial changes are extremely rare.
That's why interpretations of the Geneva convention suggest that it's a violation to use lasers.
I don't think a laser of this power qualifies as a non-lethal weapon designed only to maim soldiers. If it blows up rockets it will also kill people. To my knowledge the Geneva convention does not prohibit use of lethal lasers with potential non-lethal consequences. For comparison, bullets do not always kill, and can even ricochet, but despite the harm they can cause there is no Geneva convention prohibition against bullets.
Here is a un.org page describing the relevant text. It states, "Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices."
Everyone keeps saying, "Why do I need to upgrade when what I have works?" And software companies keep trying to come up with extra little gimmicks to convince people to upgrade, like "Look, now it spell checks words even if you type them backwards." But as software matures, the value of these new features reduces, and thus the potential profit of software companies reduces. A subscription model frees them from this concern, because if they have a subscription model they don't have to worry about producing new stuff. They can just keep charging people for the same old crap.
...But you can buy a car up front for the same amount of cash
You can also buy a cell phone with no contract for full price. Please stop furthering the lie that contracts are required.
I'll assume for your benefit that you accidently missed what I said, rather than intentionally twisting it. I said that you cannot get a reasonably priced cell phone ACCOUNT with a national provider without a contract which locks you in for two years. Sure I can buy a cell phone on ebay, but buying a cell phone on ebay (and thus not receiving the contract-signing phone discount) does NOT allow me to avoid a contract with huge termination fees.
The "forcing" is therefore a constraint that to get service I must commit to a lengthy contract which financially prevents me from choosing a competitor for a long time period, as I described above.
...But you can buy a car up front for the same amount of cash. No monopoly is FORCING
Monopoly, ha thats funny.... (you know, the ONLY cell phone company)
I suggest you check the Sherman Antitrust Act. If two companies together consist of almost the entire market, and they cooperate to fix prices, rather than engaging in fair competition, then this is a violation as readily as if one company is doing so.
The auditing facility described there basically amounts to "assume the system is not compromised, then check to see if the vote is still there". Regardless of design, this audit process is a black box and has no value for ensuring a fair election. It does not even come into the ballpark of a citizen-auditable voter-verified paper trail.
I work for a cell phone company and found your comments insightfull. And by insightfull I mean stupid.
I'm a customer of a cell phone company, and I found the grandparent poster's comments insightful and accurate.
What about the many regional carriers that are all over the place?
*crickets* If you are lucky enough to even have access to a regional carrier where you live, your connection won't work as soon as you leave a major highway or metropolitan area. This is not functional competition.
Did you happen to mention the exorbitant discounts you received when you got that free camera/bluetooth/mp3 player? Im gona go out on a limb and speculate here that you didnt.
Show me a cell phone company with national coverage in the U.S. that will let me buy a cell phone on the internet, and start a reasonably priced account with them without having a contract that has huge termination fees. ("Pay as you go" accounts are always several multiples more expensive.)
Termination fees have nothing to do with recouping hardware discounts, because you cannot get a contract without those termination fees. They are used to prevent the possibility of competition. People cannot switch providers after a few months if connectivity or customer service suck, so as a consequence there is little incentive to compete on these levels. Both companies are simply focused on getting as many people as they can to sign their two year contract, so they can lock them in. Neither company is focused on perfecting the experience or reducing the cost of service for their existing customers.
My damned bank locked me into a contract when I got that car.
But you can buy a car up front for the same amount of cash. (Actually, less.) No monopoly is FORCING you to get a car loan to obtain a car.
And then when I wanted to get a loan on a $300,000 dollar house they had the audacity to lock me into yet another length expensive contract.
But you can also choose to buy a house with cash on hand. No monopoly is FORCING you to get a mortgage as the only way to obtain a house.
So why can't we get standard cell phone account rates with hardware we purchase ourselves? (Hint: You can do this in many countries outside of the U.S.)
You can get identical functionality with certain Non-Nintendo LAN adapters. As the thread describes, it appears that you simply need one with matching vid/pid numers, and there appear to be several matching brands.
(I have used one of these with my Wii, and it works flawlessly, but at less expense and with fewer supply shortages.)
The bowling alley here runs their scoring systems on Amigas. No kidding. The guy who runs the place has a stack of them in the back room for spare parts. I have no idea what he will do when he runs out of spares...
It's a legal requirement, not a security requirement. If a company falls under SOX and they allow their employees to communicate electronically at work without recording and storing those communications, the company is breaking the law.
I'm obviously not a lawyer, but Sec 802/1520 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act only seems to apply to corporate communications directly relating to an audit. I can find no part of it which presents a legal requirement that an IM containing "Hey Bob, want to go out for lunch?", or even communication about the normal conduct of business must be recorded.
Can you clarify which section you think presents this requirement?
Unfortunately, our ability to cure diseases and stave off death has pretty much stopped the selection of the strong over the weak
Yes, it's terribly unfortunate that many gene-related disorders can now be treated and that people can live full lives rather than dying horribly at a young age.
Indeed. This is just like how it's terribly unfortunate that the survival granted by our intelligence has prevented us from evolving the strength of gorillas.
If we're going to make value judgments about the evolutionary process as the grandparent post was attempting, it is prudent to first consider what we really want to evolve into.
Don't worry, after they pay for the Forest Blog software, they'll... um... they won't be able to buy a corporate lunch. Not bankruptcy I suppose, but something.
Note, at present exchange rate, the permision to remove the links is $97.
No no no. It has nothing to do with the cost of the albu^H^H^H^Hsoftware. You see, since they didn't pay initially, they should have had a link. And if they had placed a link, then there would have been more users of Forest Blog, and thus they are liable for each user who did not use Forest Blog because they were missing the link. Therefore their liability should be $97 times everyone who has visited mpaa.org, and thus was a lost customer, plus punitive damages of $150,000 per page that should have had a link.
They're not exactly tough to dig up these days if you know how to use google, so I must assume that you did not even do a rudimentary search for yourself before believing that documentary you watched.
But if you stick your fingers in your eyes and keep humming, it's very hard to see the HIV virus.
A note to the reviewer
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 1
Indeed. It can be quite helpful in reviews of you actually provide a somewhat detailed definition, at the beginning, for what you're talking about, rather than assuming everyone has heard of it. Calling it a "static analyzer" only makes me think of balloons with hair stuck to them. And, "The first chapter is the mandatory introduction... Nothing unusual there," is simply ironic, given its absence here.
Freshmeat says, "PMD is a Java source code analyzer. It finds unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and more. It includes CPD, a tool to detect chunks of identical code."
Although I'm not sure if any of that is comparable to what's obtained by peer code review.
and all the comments people make about it supporting "groupthink" and such can easily be extrapolated to scientific review.
Uh yeah, definitely.
I'm not sure if that's a defence of slashdot's moderation/threading system, or if it's an attack on science as it stands today.
Peer review is what it is, review by peers. The problem only shows up when people start acting like peer review is a stamp of authenticity or correctness, when in reality it is neither and can be neither.
Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects.
I tend to disagree with this idea. Part of Wikipedia's value as an information source is that it is the mass conglomeration of populist opinion and perception of the world. This is NOT equal to authority, and it cannot be shifted toward such without devaluing part of its other attributes.
What would be more beneficial is if OTHER sites or subsites gathered expert articles together, such that Wikipedia can link to them or copy and paste from them as desired. Wikipedia provides a mass of information with the caveat that it is what the most active people think, and thus is not necessarilly true. But this serves a useful balance to the traditional authority-based gateways of information, as the content is therefore more diverse in opinion and wide in scope. The goal should be to increase information by tapping the wiki format in a controlled fashion to provide the availability of expert articles, but not to constrain the flow of information by restricting information to that approved by certified experts.
Slashdot Mirror
Unquestionably there's a lot of crap out there on these topics. But what we can probably all agree would be nice is if there were some site which organized such things with the ability for user moderation to raise the better material above the crap.
(Unfortunately this does not seem to be what Yahoo has in mind...)
If they had wanted to establish a continuous influx of money by making reasonably secure voting machines, then they probably could have, as demonstrated by their previous product lines. But they apparently did not, and thus they did not.
It might be in their corporate charter to make money, but that does not mean the executives and employees of Diebold were necessarily acting with this as their primary goal.
The problem is simply that they got caught in the midst of their duplicity.
Heheh. Now I'm imagining a wiimote pigeon.
If it has negligible mortality, then it is not particularly harmful. If it is mostly neutral, then it only increases genetic diversity. Genetic diversity increases the ability of a species to survive changes to the environment, since it means a wide variety of mutations which are not harmful in the current environment have been selected. If some tiny fraction of them happen to become beneficial after a change in environment, then that fraction of neutral or minimally harmful mutations will become beneficial and will begin to dominate as in the above example where neutral mutations were excluded for simplicity. (Real life example: sickle-cell anemia.)
For a discussion of evolution these definitions are quite simple:
Harmful: Reduces the probability of producing viable offspring.
Neutral: Does not change the probability of producing viable offspring.
Beneficial: Increases the probability of producing viable offspring.
(Note that this can be changed through changes in reproductive efficiency, or through changes that affect the chance of a single species member or group of species members surviving in their current environment.)
By force of logic, every mutation will therefore either be harmful, neutral, or beneficial. As I said, feel free to choose your own numbers for the probabilities for these and redo the calculation.
Thet a good joke...
You would be right, except that's precisely what selection takes care of. Yes, most mutations are NOT beneficial, but this does not matter because the non-beneficial mutations die off quickly, and the rare beneficial ones survive to spread expontentially.
Imagine a species has 100 million members, and lets say it is a large-sized species which experiences a generation turnover every 20 years or so. Lets say there is a low mutation rate of perhaps 1% of offspring having some mutation. Let us also say that 99% of mutations are harmful, or perhaps even fatal, and a mere 1% are beneficial. Now we do the math:
If 1% of the population experiences a mutation, that means 1 million will experience a mutation per generation. If 99% of these are harmful, that means 990,000 will die or fail to procreate, or 0.99% of the total population. If 1% of the mutations are beneficial, that means 10,000 will have some superior trait.
At the end of this cycle, there are still around 100 million members, but 10,000 of them, or 0.01%, have a beneficial mutation. Now by definition of a "beneficial" mutation, from an evolutionary perspective, this means that those 10,000 are more likely to survive and procreate than the other 100 million or so.
Lets say each beneficial mutation is only beneficial by a very tiny amount, such that a pair of members without the mutation can have an average of 1.95 children survive to reproduce, while pairs with the mutation can have an average of 2.05 children survive to reproduce. In this case, within 200 generations, or 4,000 years, the members of the species which have received at least one beneficial mutation from the first generation of mutations will outnumber the unmutated members of the species by 2:1.
Feel free to tweak the numbers however you see fit, and you will see that it will still work out, and the only thing you will change by tweaking numbers is how long it takes. Evolution does not require the balance of the numbers to be in its favor, because the process of mutation and selection is intrinsically in favor of improvement, even when the beneficial changes are extremely rare.
I don't think a laser of this power qualifies as a non-lethal weapon designed only to maim soldiers. If it blows up rockets it will also kill people. To my knowledge the Geneva convention does not prohibit use of lethal lasers with potential non-lethal consequences. For comparison, bullets do not always kill, and can even ricochet, but despite the harm they can cause there is no Geneva convention prohibition against bullets.
Here is a un.org page describing the relevant text. It states, "Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices."
Everyone keeps saying, "Why do I need to upgrade when what I have works?" And software companies keep trying to come up with extra little gimmicks to convince people to upgrade, like "Look, now it spell checks words even if you type them backwards." But as software matures, the value of these new features reduces, and thus the potential profit of software companies reduces. A subscription model frees them from this concern, because if they have a subscription model they don't have to worry about producing new stuff. They can just keep charging people for the same old crap.
I'll assume for your benefit that you accidently missed what I said, rather than intentionally twisting it. I said that you cannot get a reasonably priced cell phone ACCOUNT with a national provider without a contract which locks you in for two years. Sure I can buy a cell phone on ebay, but buying a cell phone on ebay (and thus not receiving the contract-signing phone discount) does NOT allow me to avoid a contract with huge termination fees.
The "forcing" is therefore a constraint that to get service I must commit to a lengthy contract which financially prevents me from choosing a competitor for a long time period, as I described above.
I suggest you check the Sherman Antitrust Act. If two companies together consist of almost the entire market, and they cooperate to fix prices, rather than engaging in fair competition, then this is a violation as readily as if one company is doing so.
The auditing facility described there basically amounts to "assume the system is not compromised, then check to see if the vote is still there". Regardless of design, this audit process is a black box and has no value for ensuring a fair election. It does not even come into the ballpark of a citizen-auditable voter-verified paper trail.
---Joke--->
O <-- You.
--|--
|
/ \
:)
I'm a customer of a cell phone company, and I found the grandparent poster's comments insightful and accurate.
*crickets* If you are lucky enough to even have access to a regional carrier where you live, your connection won't work as soon as you leave a major highway or metropolitan area. This is not functional competition.
Show me a cell phone company with national coverage in the U.S. that will let me buy a cell phone on the internet, and start a reasonably priced account with them without having a contract that has huge termination fees. ("Pay as you go" accounts are always several multiples more expensive.)
Termination fees have nothing to do with recouping hardware discounts, because you cannot get a contract without those termination fees. They are used to prevent the possibility of competition. People cannot switch providers after a few months if connectivity or customer service suck, so as a consequence there is little incentive to compete on these levels. Both companies are simply focused on getting as many people as they can to sign their two year contract, so they can lock them in. Neither company is focused on perfecting the experience or reducing the cost of service for their existing customers.
But you can buy a car up front for the same amount of cash. (Actually, less.) No monopoly is FORCING you to get a car loan to obtain a car.
But you can also choose to buy a house with cash on hand. No monopoly is FORCING you to get a mortgage as the only way to obtain a house.
So why can't we get standard cell phone account rates with hardware we purchase ourselves? (Hint: You can do this in many countries outside of the U.S.)
You can get identical functionality with certain Non-Nintendo LAN adapters. As the thread describes, it appears that you simply need one with matching vid/pid numers, and there appear to be several matching brands.
(I have used one of these with my Wii, and it works flawlessly, but at less expense and with fewer supply shortages.)
Go on strike?
I'm obviously not a lawyer, but Sec 802/1520 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act only seems to apply to corporate communications directly relating to an audit. I can find no part of it which presents a legal requirement that an IM containing "Hey Bob, want to go out for lunch?", or even communication about the normal conduct of business must be recorded.
Can you clarify which section you think presents this requirement?
Clippy meets Roomba? Perish the thought... (or the cat...)
Indeed. This is just like how it's terribly unfortunate that the survival granted by our intelligence has prevented us from evolving the strength of gorillas.
If we're going to make value judgments about the evolutionary process as the grandparent post was attempting, it is prudent to first consider what we really want to evolve into.
Err, well, the expectation value is certainly a lot better in the case of the lottery than in the case of the asteroid.
No no no. It has nothing to do with the cost of the albu^H^H^H^Hsoftware. You see, since they didn't pay initially, they should have had a link. And if they had placed a link, then there would have been more users of Forest Blog, and thus they are liable for each user who did not use Forest Blog because they were missing the link. Therefore their liability should be $97 times everyone who has visited mpaa.org, and thus was a lost customer, plus punitive damages of $150,000 per page that should have had a link.
one
two
three
four
They're not exactly tough to dig up these days if you know how to use google, so I must assume that you did not even do a rudimentary search for yourself before believing that documentary you watched.
But if you stick your fingers in your eyes and keep humming, it's very hard to see the HIV virus.
Indeed. It can be quite helpful in reviews of you actually provide a somewhat detailed definition, at the beginning, for what you're talking about, rather than assuming everyone has heard of it. Calling it a "static analyzer" only makes me think of balloons with hair stuck to them. And, "The first chapter is the mandatory introduction... Nothing unusual there," is simply ironic, given its absence here.
Freshmeat says, "PMD is a Java source code analyzer. It finds unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and more. It includes CPD, a tool to detect chunks of identical code."
Although I'm not sure if any of that is comparable to what's obtained by peer code review.
Uh yeah, definitely.
Peer review is what it is, review by peers. The problem only shows up when people start acting like peer review is a stamp of authenticity or correctness, when in reality it is neither and can be neither.
I tend to disagree with this idea. Part of Wikipedia's value as an information source is that it is the mass conglomeration of populist opinion and perception of the world. This is NOT equal to authority, and it cannot be shifted toward such without devaluing part of its other attributes.
What would be more beneficial is if OTHER sites or subsites gathered expert articles together, such that Wikipedia can link to them or copy and paste from them as desired. Wikipedia provides a mass of information with the caveat that it is what the most active people think, and thus is not necessarilly true. But this serves a useful balance to the traditional authority-based gateways of information, as the content is therefore more diverse in opinion and wide in scope. The goal should be to increase information by tapping the wiki format in a controlled fashion to provide the availability of expert articles, but not to constrain the flow of information by restricting information to that approved by certified experts.